


This perpetual state of estranged entanglement

by Ukthxbye



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF Molly Hooper, Coda, Comedy, Developing Relationship, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Sherlock, F/M, Ficlet, Fluff and Angst, Fluffy Ending, Implied Sexual Content, Mild Language, One Shot, POV John Watson, Post-Season/Series 04, Relationship(s), Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 14:16:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14498823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ukthxbye/pseuds/Ukthxbye
Summary: John Watson thought the day was going to be unassuming. That was until Molly Hooper burst into the sanctuary of 221B and a confrontation too long delayed happens before him.





	This perpetual state of estranged entanglement

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to Eclecticmuse(Ao3) for all the grammer help and love and support. Thanks to SevenLostkeys on tumblr for the confidence boost and other editing. And shout out to Mouse9(Ao3) for the ultimate confidence boost needed to get this thing published  
> This is my first fanfic in years and it demanded to be written after 221B Con. This is a coda on the end of the BBC Sherlock series as we know it and answers what happened. I hope you enjoy. I listened to a few songs while writing it so you are welcome to enjoy the short but likely will be added to Sherlolly playlist on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/user/126082917/playlist/4eBn0oUJtjejB94tmreYgt?si=dlYlWaqgSv6M24Z7DvHkRg

“Fuck you, Sherlock Holmes,” Molly Hooper fires the verbal shot as she enters his sanctuary.

 

It had been an ordinary day, as ordinary as days went around 221B Baker Street. A few piddling cases solved in moments, some new evidence but nothing worth chasing at the moment. It was a sunny afternoon, light encasing the room where the curtains were drawn open. In that light, Molly stood like a soldier at the front lines.

 

Both John Watson and Sherlock pop their heads up. John is both shocked at her opening words and feels relief from expecting this exchange. Since the events at Sherrinford with Eurus,he prodded Sherlock both subtly, and not so much, to speak to her as soon as possible. _Maybe Sherlock had?_ John never could get an answer. But of course, his emotionally charged but also emotionally stunted friend had delayed it too long. _You bloody well deserve that,_  John thinks to himself, _Though it is shocking hearing those words out of her mouth._ John looks between both of them, reading their looks in bemused silence.

 

Molly’s shoulders soften as the seconds pass in quiet, losing some of the fire in her dark eyes from being in Sherlock’s physical presence, John notes.

 

Sherlock sits facing the door and now as if fated, Molly. John sat on the couch earlier contemplating a nap. Rosie kept him up late. John notes that Molly had come from St Barts likely, wearing one of her typical odd jumpers. This one was another cracker, blue with some kind of dogs on them perhaps? Though John notices she did have a likely smart dress on underneath and comfortable heels. _A date later, perhaps? Oh God,_  he exclaims to himself, I _am starting to think like Sherlock._

 

Sherlock keeps a seemingly flat face and finally answers to Molly, “Really, Molly. Language.”

 

Shoulders square, the fire was stoked to a roaring bonfire now inside her and it shows, John thinks

.

“Language?!" she nearly shouts, her voice cracking in clear amazement. “Oh, bloody fucking hell, Sherlock. You deserve a lot more than that.” 

 

John looks down at his phone and mumbles his thoughts, realizing he shouldn’t get involved too late. “She’s right, mate.” 

 

“What was that, John?” Sherlock’s piercing glare turns to his friend. 

 

“Oh, nothing nothing, you know I am just going to pop out to a shop? Yeah, I'll just see you two later then?” John smiles none too convincingly at the two. He looks at Molly but her eyes do not leave Sherlock’s face. He catches Sherlock’s though and stays silent and waits.

 

“You said something under your breath. Please, do share with the class,” Sherlock says sarcastically.

 

John sighs heavily, head hanging down in weariness. “I just thought…I just said, well, you should have addressed this before today.” John pauses, looking Sherlock in the eyes. “It’s been three weeks, Sherlock.”

 

“Oh, since we have an opinion on how and when I talk to others, you should stay here for all of this, then,” Sherlock declares.

 

“What? No-- really--this is really personal, I should leave,” John begs. 

 

“Sit,” Sherlock commands.

 

John looks pleadingly at the other party. “Molly?”

 

“I don’t care. Wait. No, I do want you to stay, because I need a witness to this. Maybe once I am done you can translate it for your friend, who has the emotional maturity of a five-year-old,” Molly sneers.

 

_Ouch,_ thought John, _and yet, was she wrong?_ So he sits back on the couch.

 

“Okay, your therapist is sitting now, proceed,” he says half-jokingly.

 

They both glare until John sits back sheepishly into the couch. Then they start in on each other.

 

“Five-year-old? Really, Molly, I took you to be more knowledgeable about such psychology,” Sherlock mocks.

 

“I was being insulting. Clinically, I am sure it’s more like a twelve-year-old,” she returns.

 

Sherlock smirks. “Says the woman who dates psychopathic bad boys and Sherlock look-a-likes by the dozens.”

 

_It was hyperbole, right?_ thinks John. He realizes he really doesn’t know Molly but sees why Mary found her fascinating. Perhaps why Sherlock does as well. 

 

She sniffs at that, “Why should you really care so much? I have a type, so what. Like you haven’t sussed that out and used it to your advantage?”

 

John raises an eyebrow and looks at them both. 

 

Sherlock furrows his brow. “What are you referring to?” he asks cautiously.

 

“Shall we talk about those nights in your bolthole or as it is now known,my flat? Or were you too high to remember those moments, too?” she asks plainly. 

 

John looks up from his phone, which he had checked to keep the awkwardness away, _I wish Mary was here oh God she would love this_ , he laughs to himself. She’d had theories and it had taken all of John’s pleading for her to not ask Sherlock directly once it came out he had been hiding out at Molly’s when he was supposed to be dead. 

 

John sighs in the bittersweetness of the moment, feeling that tug on his heart, but quickly remembers the fact that he is not Mary and does not want details of those nights.

 

“Ah, ok, um… Molly, if you are going to talk about such things, I can, um, can I leave?” he asks.

 

“You. Stay. There.” Sherlock barks.

 

John puts his head in his hands and groans.

 

“Just because you know I have sex with other men casually does not make what happened with us casual. Those nights you curled up behind me, never saying a word… but your hands and other parts spoke,” she states, emotion cracking her voice in the end.

 

John grimaces from the pain of the image now stuck in his head.

 

“Thanks for that mental image, Molly,” he says, heavy with sarcasm. 

 

John then glances at Sherlock and is taken aback. He sees a chink in the man’s armor, a softening in his eyes and jaw as memories came forward and smashed like a wave on his face. John sees and waits. 

 

“Molly, I thought it was understood, or--” Sherlock stammers a bit.

 

“You don’t understand anything, do you? You thought that was it?” she shoots back with fire and hurt.“That was all I wanted? Your body?” 

John thought, _This is the moment she can’t hold back and it all goes spilling out, bloody hell this is personal and God I really wish Mary was here._

 

“Molly…” Sherlock starts with confusion but stops with his mouth open.

 

There is a deafening pause, felt by all in the room before Molly speaks as if the oxygen has been sucked out. 

 

“You never said any words to me. Nothing. It was like making love to a ghost,” she says quietly, with an ache on the edge of her voice and that sad sort of half-smile she has. John had noticed that smile before, but now it had become inconveniently clear to John the pain it tries to conceal. 

 

As if on cue, the bright spring sunlight hide behind the clouds for that moment, casting a pale shade of gray across the room, leaving John in a shadow and Molly and Sherlock framed in the soft light.

 

John feels his heart sink in his stomach for Molly, and his embarrassment is replaced by the discomfort of another kind. He stares at Sherlock to keep away the unease at Molly’s confession. And then he sees the crack. If John wasn’t a man in control of his PTSD, it would have been triggered there. It would have taken him back to Sherrinford. It was Sherlock’s face before he broke that coffin. Smashing it with all the rage and hurt and love he could. That look of love realized and love intense. Of loss of control. John knows that look and he looks at Molly. Can she know what that look means? John thinks _By God Sherlock, please say the right thing, say something._ John wrings his hands instinctively.

 

“You made me say it first,” Sherlock finally breathes out.

 

Molly stares eyes slanting as nanoseconds pass between breaths, “Yes? Because I … What the hell, Sherlock?”

 

Sherlock looks lost again, John observes quickly. Properly lost. Shit, I got to help him, don’t I? it became clear why he made me stay now, John confirms to himself.

 

“Sherlock, I don’t know if she knows what was happening when this phone call happened,” John says matter of factually, looking back at Molly and then at Sherlock. “Sherlock, do you need me to say it?” John emphasizes with more strength. “Tell her what happened?”

John stands up, feeling weird being the only one seated now. He decides that staring at Sherlock is the best he can do, giving his friend a moment to decide his fate.

 

“Jesus, tell her Sherlock!’ John raises his voice.

 

Sherlock goes to open his mouth, but Molly starts, with a stronger voice than her last.

 

“I know it was because you thought she was going to kill me. Greg told me,“ she says plainly, eyes locked with Sherlock’s. “You said it to save my life, though at the time I did not know that. No, at the time I thought perhaps something real was there,” She laughed. A sad, throaty kind that breaks John’s heart again.

 

“And I thought?” she pauses, looking down at her hands, picking at her cuticles, “Maybe I would get another phone call?” 

John glances at Molly, hoping she’ll look at him, see a sympathetic look of help. So she knew all this time. He wished he had something but he didn’t think it was his place. He has never seen his friend so paralyzed. So helpless even when he has been bleeding out in front of him. Sherlock had it under control but now, he is just a man frozen and lost. 

“Did you call her, Sherlock? Text her? Anything?” John hates saying it, sounding like a parent with a naughty child, but situations are what they are.

 

Sherlock obviously swallows a lump in his throat.

 

“I wanted to make sure it was safe and I…am a coward…just a coward,” he answers.

 

It was just like when he told her he loved her. The first was saying what was suppose to be said. What was expected like ceremony.But the second, the realization. The truth. John remembers it now clear as day. Will Molly know? He searches her face.

 

“So, I just accept that? Accept you are always a coward when it matters?” Molly cries out shoulders rising up again. She stares holes through Sherlock, and John can feel that verve coming back into her voice. “That I live in this perpetual state of estranged entanglement until one of us really dies?” she exasperates. John sees now her eyes are watering. 

Sherlock does not drop the last tone he had. He puts no wall back up and John sinks back into the couch to give them space. 

 

“No. Never accept my worst again, Molly. Tell me to fuck off, tell me I am an ass,” Sherlock half laughs though near tears.“Make me better as you already have. I promise, from this day forward I am done with this game, this experiment. My sister cleared any evidence that I was the sociopath I thought I was. I am not. Emotions, I thought were inconvenient. But I was just being a pretentious twat. And… I am sorry,” he breathes out like he is drowning.

 

John watches Sherlock finally unroot from his stance, as he moves to toward Molly. “Molly, please…”

 

But Molly leans back,“What? No! you don't get off that easy.” 

 

She looks almost angry, and John is frozen in his seat, looking back and forth between the two. 

 

“I don’t know what to believe anymore, Sherlock! Three weeks!’ Molly cries out, brow furrowing. “Am I to believe you love me and could do that? After you made me say the thing I didn’t want to say? Any more than you wanted to say?” Molly near shouts, with new tears forming at the corners of her eyes. John wishes he could crawl in a hole or at least do something. Punching his friend feels like a good option but he refrains. 

 

Sherlock opens his mouth to say something, John waits to see if he needs to counter or assist. But in flash Sherlock closes the gap between him and Molly across the room. He stands inches from her, so close he must now look down on her to make eye contact. Blue and brown meet and stare for what seems forever for John. But something softens in both faces. Sherlock brings his hand tenderly to her face, barely touching it. 

 

“Teach me how to help you believe, Molly. I love you. I make no promise except that I will honor that truth,” Sherlock confesses in one breath.

 

Molly closes her eyes, causing a few stray tears to fall, “Fuck you, Sherlock Holmes…I love you.” They both give up the last inches of air between them, embracing and lips meet with urgency and ache.

 

John breathes a quiet sigh of relief. He quietly rises from the couch, putting his coat on in the same movement. He looks back once more as he slips out the door, smiles deeply and contently as he closes the door for his dear friends.

John steps out of 221B and the clouds begin to part again. He laughs to himself, closing his eyes for a moment as he drinks in the sunlight, not noticing immediately Mrs. Hudson as she hurries toward the door.

 

“Oh John, going out for tea perhaps? I am not your housekeeper after all, but I thought you and Sherlock might want to have tea with me? Perhaps I’ll just take the tea up to Sherlock now.’

 

John mischievously thinks about the comedy of Mrs. Hudson walking in on Molly and Sherlock in some compromising position but decides that those two have gone through enough. 

 

“Ah no, Mrs. Hudson, I think Sherlock is quite occupied. Molly is paying a visit and I have been essentially kicked out for the afternoon,” he chuckles. 

 

Mrs. Hudson looks up and smiles warmly, clasping her hands together, “Oh? Finally! Good on them.” she chuckles as well. “Mind if I join you then John?” He offered his arm which she takes and they begin a stroll down Baker Street smirking from the secret they both know. 


End file.
